


Superdome

by dafna



Category: Sports Night
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-09-11
Updated: 2005-09-11
Packaged: 2017-11-23 16:13:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/624080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dafna/pseuds/dafna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The week after the Saints became a symbol instead of a joke, Dana came to work an hour early each day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Superdome

**Author's Note:**

> Written and set right after Hurricane Katrina.

The week after the Saints became a symbol instead of a joke, Dana came to work an hour early each day.

The first thing she did was read her e-mail. Jeremy was in Baton Rouge with CNN, Natalie was in Atlanta, worried about Jeremy, and Danny was in Texas, volunteering. Casey was 10 feet from her door, but sent her links to different things he found online anyway.

The second thing she did each day was read the news sites.

Then she threw up.

Then she reached for her bottle of water and began marking up the preliminary rundown.

Little known fact about Dana Whitaker: She’d turned down her first offer to work in sports.

She’d been 22, and determined to be a real journalist, and when the producer for the back-up sports reporter had skipped town, someone had remembered that she sort of knew about football, right? Not really, she’d said, and gone back to working on the piece she’d done on restaurant owners who had their patrons’ cars towed away.

A year passed and she got better assignments and some of the more important correspondents asked for her as vacation fill-in for their regular producers and that’s how Dana happened to be working with Carl Ellis the night of the Saracen warehouse fire.

Smoke, flames and fear. And the smell of burned flesh. Three firefighters were killed that night and what she mostly remembers is telling her cameraman to make sure he got the bodies going past in the same frame as the young fireman who had taken his hat off and was crying. They won a local Emmy.

Two months later, it had been a group of teenagers in a Scirocco, wrapped around a tree. A month later, a drunk pulled out of a river.

Three months later, she found herself telling the station manager that actually, she really did know a lot about sports, and maybe she could do a better job segment-producing on the six-o-clock show than the burned-out hack they currently had, who seemed to think that the best way to cover baseball was from a bar.

So she’d fled to sports and discovered that really, it was pretty similar to news. The same six or seven stories on a seemingly infinite loop, the same petty cynicism, the same need to personalize with patronizing, the same need to schmooze without sucking up. Very few people died, however, and Dana appreciated that.

It wasn’t until Texas that she grew to love covering sports on its own merits. The insanity of the fans, the 2,000 artificial rules and regulations, the shared delusion necessary to sustain such a big game with so little at stake -– it was wonderfully orderly and illogical at the same time.

In New York she realized that it was the job itself she loved. Turning a day’s worth of headlines and the work of 23 people into an hour of television. And then getting up and doing it all over again the next day. It was never boring and it wasn’t something she thought she’d ever get quite right, and that was part of the fun. And if she occasionally felt like the best pitcher in the minor leagues, Dana was basically OK with that.

September 11th, of course, had proved that real life is fully capable of bringing you smoke, flames and fear even if you don’t make it your day job. So Dana wasn’t really surprised when Jeremy left soon after, to become an embed for one of the news magazines. And she was even less surprised when he did a damn good job at it and came back and proposed to Natalie, job offers for both of them in Atlanta in hand.

Danny was never the same, either, though whether it was 9/11 itself or losing Natalie to the real world, Dana wasn’t sure. Danny, more than any of them, wanted to believe that the people you work with were your family, and felt Natalie going off to news as both a loss and a reproach.

“Don’t you ever want to do anything real?” he’d asked her.

“Sports is real,” she’d said. “It doesn’t really matter, true, but it’s still real.”

“You don’t think we’re, the, you know, the bread and circuses?”

Dana’s mouth twitched and she tilted her head. “Well, maybe the chariot races.”

So Danny left, of course, but much later and not after a lot of therapy and assurances from Casey that he would be OK without him, really.

The week after the Superdome became a dateline, Dana watched the coverage and thought, I wonder who I’ll lose this time.


End file.
